Enabling a Living Software Development Process with Process Patterns

Today’s software development projects are confronted with a frequently changing environment like rapidly altering business domains and processes, a fast technology evolution and a great variety of evolving methods and development processes. Therefore highly flexible and adaptable software development processes are required, which allow projects to react on changes quickly and to adopt existing development methods to comply with the projects’ actual needs. Such a process, which allows static and dynamic tailoring and evolutionary improvements, is called a living software development process. This article introduces a common process framework for the living software development process based on the concepts of process patterns and work artefacts. The proposed framework enables software engineers to define, evolve and apply a flexible development process with respect to the daily needs of their software development project. A running example guides the reader through the article.